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Chinese American history is
the history of Chinese Americans
or the history of ethnic Chinese in
the United
States.Chinese
immigration to the U.S. consisted of three major waves, with
the first beginning in the 19th century. Chinese immigrants in the
19th century worked as laborers, particularly on the transcontinental railroad, such as
the Central Pacific
Railroad, and the mining industry, and suffered racial discrimination. While
industrial employers were eager to get this new and cheap labor,
the ordinary white public was stirred to anger by the presence of
this "yellow peril." Political party
caucuses, labor
unions, and other organizations rallied against the immigration
of yet another "inferior race". Newspapers condemned the policies
of employers, and even church leaders denounced the entrance of
these aliens into what was regarded as a
land for whites only. So hostile was the opposition that in 1882
the United States Congress
eventually passed the Chinese
Exclusion Act, which prohibited immigration from China for the
next ten years. This law was then extended by the Geary Act in 1892. The Chinese Exclusion Act was
the only
U.S. law ever to prevent immigration and naturalization on the
basis of
race. These laws not only prevented new immigration but also
brought additional suffering as they prevented the reunion of the
families of thousands of Chinese men already living in the U.S.
that had left China without their wives and children; anti-miscegenation laws in many
states prohibited Chinese men from marrying white women.

In 1924 the law barred further entries of Chinese; those already in
the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year.
Also by
1924, all Asian immigrants (except people from the Philippines, which had been annex by
the United States in 1898) were utterly excluded by law, denied
citizenship and naturalization, and
prevented from marrying Caucasians or
owning land.

Only since the 1940s when the US and China became allies during
World War II, did the situation for
Chinese Americans begin to improve, as restrictions on entry into
the country, naturalization and mixed marriage were being lessened.
In 1943, Chinese immigration to the U.S. was once again permitted —
by way of the Magnuson Act — thereby
repealing 61 years of official racial discrimination against the
Chinese. Large scale Chinese immigration did not occur until 1965
when the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965 lifted national origin quotas. After
World War II, anti-Asian prejudice began to decrease, and Chinese
immigrants, along with other Asians (such as Japanese, Koreans,
Indians and Vietnamese), have adapted and advanced. Currently, the
Chinese constitute the largest ethnic group of Asian Americans (about 22%), and have
confounded earlier expectations that they would form an
indigestible mass in American
society. For example, many Chinese
Americans of American birth may know little or nothing about
traditional Chinese culture, just as
European Americans and African Americans may know little or
nothing about the original cultures of their ancestors.

Today in the United States, there are more than 3.3 million Chinese
— about 1% of the total population — of which, by far the vast
majority belongs to the middle classsocial stratum. The influx continues,
where each year hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese people from
the People's
Republic of China, Taiwan and to a
lesser extent Southeast Asia move to
the US.

Expedition of Chinese missionaries in the 5th century

A group of
Buddhistmissionaries, led by priest Hui Shen (慧深) (from "Jilin", which is now Kabul) and commissioned by the Chinese Emperor, are claimed to have
undertaken a sea voyage to the east in the 5th century. Hui
Shen’s descriptions of this trip were later documented in the
Book of Liang (compiled in
635), part of the Twenty-Four
Histories. Hui Shen described in it his discovery of a
land mass called "Fusang". The majority of
historians today say that it is almost a near certainty that this
journey led the group only as far as Korea or Japan, although a
few have continued to claim that according to the distance readings
given by Hui Shen, he and his group must have arrived at the west
coast of the North American
continent.

Transpacific trade

It is less
dubious that the Chinese reached North
America during the time of the Spanish colonial rule over the
Philippines (1565-1815), where they had established themselves
as fishermen, sailors and merchants on Spanish galleons which sailed between the Philippines and
Mexican ports.California at the time belonged to Mexico till 1848, and
historians have asserted that a low number of Chinese had settled
down there already by the mid-18th century.Also later, as part of
expeditions in 1788 and 1789 by John
Meares, a British fur trader, sailing to Vancouver
island from Canton (now Guangzhou), China, having hired several Chinese sailors and
craftsmen to help build the first European-designed boat to be
launched in British
Columbia.

Shortly after the American
Revolutionary War, the United States had already begun
transpacific maritime trade with China, first with the commercial
port of Canton (Guangzhou). There the Chinese became excited about
opportunities and curious about America by their contact with
American sailors and merchants. The main trade route between the U.S. and
China then was between Canton and New England, where the first Chinese arrived via Cape Horn (as the Panama Canal did not exist then). These Chinese were
mainly merchants, sailors, seamen, and students who wanted to see
and acquaint themselves with a strange foreign land they had only
heard about. However their presence was mostly temporary and only a
few settled there permanently. American missionaries in China also
sent small numbers of Chinese boys to the United States for
schooling. From 1818 to 1825, five students stayed at
the Foreign Mission School in
Cornwall,
Connecticut.In 1854 Yung Wing
became the first Chinese graduate from an American college,
Yale
University.

First wave (1800s to 1949): the beginning of the Chinese
migration

Background

Chinese emigration to America: sketch
on board the steam-ship Alaska, bound for San Francisco.

The early 19th Sino-U.S. maritime trade began the history of
Chinese Americans. At first only a handful of Chinese came, mainly
as merchants, students, former sailors, to America. The first Chinese arrived in the United States around 1820. Subsequent immigrants that came
from the 1820s up to the late 1840s were mainly men. This was much later
followed by thousands - mostly from Guangdong province - who wanted to make their fortune in the
1849-era California gold
rush. The Chinese did not however only come for the gold
rush in California, but helped build the first transcontinental
railway, worked the southern plantations after the Civil War, and for the setting up of
California's agriculture and fisheries. From the outset, they were
faced with the racism of settled European population, which since
the 1870s culminated in massacres and forced relocations of Chinese
migrants into what became known as Chinatowns. Also with regard to the legal
situation, the Chinese were by far more badly posed in the US than
most other ethnic minorities. They had to pay special taxes, were
not allowed to marry white European partners and could not acquire
national American citizenzhip.

Up until then, very few Chinese felt compelled to move to the
United States. Life in China was generally sufficient and the North
American west coast lay far away and with its sparseness offered
very little incentive for a better existence. Nevertheless, in
China, as well as in America, circumstances soon changed
dramatically. After losing the First
Opium War in 1840-1842, China was made to give up its trade
protectionism and to concede land
settlements to the victorious foreign powers. With economic
collapse, natural disasters and further foreign imperial expansion
the situation in China deteriorated sharply by events most notably
by the Second Opium War (1856-1860)
and the Taiping Rebellion
(1851-1864), which led to more than 20 million deaths. The
continued mass poverty and destruction drove many millions into
exodus, with nearly all settling in Southeast Asia. Shortly after
hearing from the Cantonese sailors and merchants who returned with
early stories of the Californian Gold Rush that began in 1848,
Chinese gold-seekers from the SE Asia region, including China,
began arriving in 1849, at first in modest numbers to "Gold Mountain", the name given to California
in Chinese. In 1852, the ratio of Chinese males to females in
California was 1,685:1. Due to the lack of Chinese women in the
United
States at that time, a number of men intermarried with
Americans of European descent. However, the majority of male
immigrants lived as bachelors.

Departure from China

Decrees
by the Qing dynasty issued in 1712 and 1724, forbade emigration and
overseas trade and were primarily intended to prevent remnant
supporters of the Ming
dynasty from establishing bases overseas. However
these decrees were widely ignored. Large scale immigration of
Chinese laborers began after the Opium
Wars the Burlingame Treaty
with the United States in 1868 effectively lifted any restrictions
on emigration and began large-scale immigration to the United
States. In order to avoid as much as possible the
troubles of leaving, most of the Chinese gold-seekers embarked on
their transpacific voyage from the British colony of Hong Kong.More seldom they left from the Portuguese
colony of Macau, which was a
large transhipment center for bonded, unfree laborers (called
‘coolies’ as their contracts specified
conditions which were approximated to servitude, slavery or
peonage). Only merchants were able to
take their wives and children overseas. The vast majority of
Chinese migrants were peasants, farmers and craftsmen. Young men,
who were usually married, left their wives and children behind
since they at first had the intention of only staying in America
temporarily. Wives also had another major reason for staying behind
as they had a traditional role in looking after her parents-in-law.
From the money which the men earned in America they sent a large
part back to China. Because it was usual in China at the time to
live in very socially confined social nets of families, unions and
guilds, sometimes whole village communities and even regions (for
instance, Taishan) sent nearly all or every of their young men to
California. From the beginning of the California gold rush to 1882 – when an
American federal law ended the Chinese influx – approximately
300,000 Chinese had arrived in the United States. Because the
chances to earn more money were by far better in America than in
China, these migrants often remained considerably longer than they
had at first planned, despite of the increased xenophobia and hostility that was being directed
against them.

Arrival in the United States

The Chinese emigrants booked their passages
on ships with the Pacific
Mail Steamship Company (founded 1848) and the Occidental and
Oriental Steamship Company (founded 1874). The money needed to
fund their journey was mostly borrowed from relatives, district
associations or from commercial lenders. Also, American employers
of Chinese laborers also sent hiring agencies to China to pay for
the Pacific voyage of those who were unable to borrow money. This
"credit-ticket system" meant
that the money advanced by the agencies to cover the cost of the
passage was to be paid back by wages earned by the laborers later
during their time in the U.S. The credit-ticket system had long
been used by indentured migrants from South China who left to work
in what Chinese called Nanyang (South Seas), the
region to the south of China that included the Philippines, the
former Dutch East Indies, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo,
Thailand, Indochina, and Burma. The Chinese who left for Australia also used the credit-ticket
system.

The entry of the Chinese into the U.S. was, to begin with, legal
and uncomplicated and even had a formal judicial basis in 1868 with
the signing of the Burlingame
Treaty between the United States and China. But there were
differences compared with the policy for European immigrants, in
that if the Chinese migrants had children that were born in the
USA, those children would automatically acquire American citizenship, but the
immigrants themselves would remain as foreigners indefinitely.
Unlike that with European immigrants the possibility of naturalization was withheld from them.

Although the newcomers arrived in America after an already
established small community of their fellow compatriots, they
experienced many culture shocks in
what to them was a strange country. The Chinese immigrants neither spoke and
understood English nor were
familiar with western culture and
life; they often came from the rural lands in China and therefore
had difficulty in adjusting to and finding their way around big
towns like San
Francisco. The
racism which they had met from the European Americans from the
outset of their arrival increased continuously to the turn of the
century and prevented with lasting effect their assimilation into mainstream American
society; this in turn led to the creation, cohesion and cooperation
of many Chinese benevolent associations and societies whose
existence in the U.S. remained far into the 20th century as a
necessity both for support and survival for the Chinese in America.
There were also many other reasons that laid within the Chinese
themselves that had obstructed and hindered their assimilation,
notably their appearance. Under the rule of the Qing Dynasty, Han Chinese men were
forced under the threat of beheading to follow the Manchu custom of dressing including shaving the front
of their heads and combing the remaining hair into a queue. Historically, to the
Manchus, the policy was both an act of submission and, in practical
terms, an identification aid of friend from foe. Because Chinese
immigrants returned as often as they could to China to see their
family, they could not when in America cut off their often hated
braids and then legally enter China again.

Portrait of a married Chinese-American
woman in the 1870s.

The first Chinese immigrants usually remained faithful to
traditional Chinese beliefs, which were either Confucianism, ancestral worship, Buddhism or Daoism, while
some others adhered to any of the various ecclesiastical religious doctrines. The number
of the Chinese migrants who converted to Christianity remained at first low. They were
mainly Protestants who had already
been converted in China where foreign Christian missionaries (who
had first come en mass in the 19th century) had strived for
centuries to wholly Christianize the nation with relatively minor
success. Christian missionaries had also worked in the Chinese
communities and settlements in America, but nevertheless their
religious message found few who were receptive. It was estimated
that during the first wave until the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, less than 20
percent of Chinese immigrants had accepted Christian teachings.
Their difficulty in being integrated was also exemplified by the
end of the first wave in the mid-20th century when only a minority
of Chinese living in the U.S. could speak English.

Of the first wave of Chinese who came to America, few were women.
In 1850, the Chinese community of San Francisco consisted of 4018
men and only 7 women. In 1855, women made up only two percent of
the Chinese population in the U.S., and even in 1890 it had
increased to only 4.8 percent. The lack of visibility of Chinese
women in the general public was due partially to factors such as
the cost of making the voyage when there was a lack of work
opportunities for Chinese women in America, harsh working
conditions and having the traditional female responsibility of
looking after the children and extended family back in China. The
only women who did go to America were usually the wives of
merchants. Other factors were cultural in nature, such as having
bound feet and not leaving the home.
Another important consideration was that most Chinese men were
worried that by bringing their wives and raising families in
America they too would have been subjected to the same racial
violence and discrimination which
they themselves had faced. With the heavily uneven gender ratio,
prostitution grew rapidly and the Chinese sex
trade and trafficking became a
lucrative business. From the documents of the 1870 U.S.Census, 61 percent of 3536
Chinese women in California had been classified as prostitutes as an occupation. The existence of
Chinese prostitution was detected early, after which the police,
legislature and popular press singled out Chinese prostitutes for
criticism and were seen as further evidence of the depravity of the
Chinese and the repression of their women by their patriarchal cultural values.

Laws passed by the California state legislature in 1866 that sought
to curb the brothels and missionary activity by the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches helped reduce the
number of Chinese prostitutes and in the 1880 U.S.Census documents only 24 percent
of 3171 Chinese women in California were classified as prostitutes.
Many of these women married Chinese Christians and formed some of
the earliest Chinese-American families in mainland America.
Nevertheless, American legislation used the prostitution issue to
make the immigration of Chinese women far more difficult.
On March
3, 1875, in Washington,
D.C., the United
States Congress enacted the Page Act
that forbade all Chinese women who were considered "obnoxious" by
representatives of U.S. consulates at their origins of
departure. In effect, this lead to American officials to
class many women as prostitutes, who actually were not, which
greatly reduced the opportunities for all Chinese women to enter
the United States.

Formation of Chinese American associations

Member Certificate card of Sam Yup
Association.

Societies in pre-1911
revolutionary China were distinctively collectivist – they were
composed of close networks of extended families, unions, clan associations and guilds, where people had
a duty to protect and help one another. Soon after the first
Chinese had settled in San Francisco respectable Chinese merchants – the most prominent
members of the Chinese community of the time – made the first
assiduous effort to form social and welfare organizations (Chinese:
"Kongsi") in order to help
immigrants to locate others from their native towns, socialize,
receive monetary aid and raise voices in community affairs.
At first, these organizations only provided interpretation, lodgings
and job finding services for newcomers.
In 1849, the first Chinese merchants’ association was formed, but
it did not last long. In less than a few years it petered out as
its role was gradually replaced by a network of Chinese district and clan
associations when more immigrants came in greater numbers.
Eventually some of the more prominent district associations merged
to become the Chinese Consolidated
Benevolent Association (more commonly known as the "Chinese Six
Companies" because of the original six founding associations).
It
quickly became the most powerful and politically vocal organization
to represent the Chinese not only in San Francisco but for the whole of California. In other large cities and regions in
America similar associations were formed.

The Chinese associations mediated disputes and soon began
participating in the hospitality
industry, lending, health, and education and funeral services.
The last being especially significant for the Chinese community
because many of the immigrants for religious reasons laid value to
burial or cremation (including the
scattering of ashes) in China. In the 1880s many of the city and
regional associations united to form a national Chinese Consolidated
Benevolent Association (CCBA), an umbrella organization, which defended
the political rights and legal interests of the Chinese American community, particularly
during times of anti-Chinese
repression. By resisting overt discrimination enacted against them, the
local chapters of the national CCBA helped to bring a number of
cases to the courts from the municipal level to the Supreme
Court to fight discriminatory legislation and
treatment. The associations also took their cases to the
press and worked with governmental institutions and the Chinese
diplomatic missions to protect their rights. In the San
Francisco Chinatown, birth site of the CCBA, formed in 1882, the CCBA
had effectively assumed the function of an unofficial local
governing body, which even used privately-hired police or guards
for protection of inhabitants at the height of the anti-Chinese
excesses.

Following a law enacted in New York, in 1933, in an attempt to
evict Chinese from the laundry business, the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance
was founded, rivalizing, on the left, to the CCBA.

A minority of the Chinese immigrants did not join the CCBA as they
were outcasts or lacked the clan or family
ties to join more prestigious Chinese surname associations, business
guilds, or legitimate enterprises. As a result, they organized
themselves into their own secret societies - called Tongs - for mutual support and
protection of their members. These first tongs modeled themselves upon
the triads, underground organizations
dedicated to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and adopted their codes of brotherhood, loyalty,
and patriotism.

Marginalized, poor, low educational levels and lacking
opportunities than the wealthier Chinese, the tongs (unlike the
triads) had formed without any clear political motives and soon
found themselves involved in lucrative criminal activities, including extortion, gambling,
people smuggling, and prostitution. Prostitution proved to be an
extremely profitable business for the tongs, due to the high
male-to-female ratio among the early immigrants. The tongs would
kidnap or purchase females (including babies) from China and
smuggle them over the Pacific Ocean to work in brothels and
similar establishments.The tongs constantly battled over territory,
profits, and women in feuds known as the tong
wars, occurring between the 1850s to the 1920s, notably in
San
Francisco, Cleveland and Los
Angeles.

Fields of work

The Chinese came to America in large numbers as individual miners
during the 1849 California Gold
Rush with 40,400 being recorded as arriving from 1851-1860, and
again in the 1860s when the Central Pacific Railroad recruited
large labor gangs, many on five year contracts, to build its
portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The
Chinese laborers worked out well and thousands more were recruited
until the railroad's completion in 1869. Chinese labor
provided the massive labor needed to build the majority of the
Central Pacific's difficult railroad tracks through the Sierra Nevada mountains and across
Nevada. The
Chinese population rose from 2,716 in 1851 to 63,000 by 1871. In
the decade 1861-70, 64,301 were recorded as arriving, followed by
123,201 in 1871-80 and 61,711 in 1881-1890. 77% were located in
California, with the rest scattered across the West, the South, and
New
England. Most came from Southern China looking for a
better life; escaping a high rate of poverty left after the
Taiping Rebellion. This
immigration may have been as high as 90% male as most immigrated
with the thought of returning home to start a new life. Those that
stayed in America faced the lack of suitable Chinese brides as
Chinese women were not allowed to emigrate in significant numbers
after 1872. As a result, the mostly bachelor communities slowly
aged in place with very low Chinese birth rates.

For most
Chinese immigrants of the 1850s San Francisco was only a transit station on the way to the gold
fields in the Sierra Nevada. According to estimates, there
were in the late 1850s 15,000 Chinese mine workers in the "Gold
Mountains" or "Mountains of Gold" (Cantonese: Gam Saan, 金山). Because
anarchic conditions prevailed in the gold fields, the robbery by
European miners of Chinese mining area permits were barely pursued
or prosecuted and the Chinese gold seekers themselves were often
victim to violent assaults. In response to this hostile situation
these Chinese miners developed a basic approach which differed from
the white European gold miners; while the Europeans mostly worked
as individuals or in small groups, the Chinese formed large teams,
in which not only were they protected against attacks, but on
account of their good organization they also often achieved a
considerably higher yield. To protect themselves even further
against attacks, they preferred to mainly turn to such areas which
had been previously judged by other gold seekers as unproductive
and had been given up. Because much of the gold fields were
exhaustingly gone over up until the beginning of the 20th century,
many of the Chinese remained far longer there than the European
gold seekers; in 1870, a third of the men in the Californian golden
fields were Chinese.

However, their displacement had begun already in 1850 when the
white gold miners began to resent the Chinese miners, feeling that
they were discovering gold that the white miners deserved. And
eventually, protest rose from white miners to eliminate the growing
competition. From 1852 to 1870 (ironically when the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was
passed), the California
legislature enforced a series of taxes.

In 1852, a special foreign miner's tax aimed at the Chinese was
passed by the California legislature that was aimed at foreign
miners who were not U.S. citizens. Given that the Chinese were
ineligible for citizenship at that time and constituted the largest
percentage of the non-white population, the taxes were primarily
aimed at them and tax revenue was therefore generated almost
exclusively by the Chinese. This tax required a payment of three
dollars each month at a time when Chinese miners were making
approximately six dollars a month. Tax collectors could legally
take and sell the property of those miners who refused or could not
pay the tax. Fake tax collectors made money by taking advantage of
people who could not speak English well, and some tax collectors,
both false and real, stabbed or shot miners who could not or would
not pay the tax. During the 1860s, many Chinese were expelled from
the mine fields and were forced to find other types of jobs. This
Foreign Miner's Tax existed till 1870.

The
position of the Chinese gold seekers also was complicated by a
decision of the California Supreme Court which decided in the case "The People of the State of California
v.George W.Hall" ("People v. Hall") in 1854 that the
Chinese were not allowed to testify as witnesses before the court
in California against white citizens, including those accused of
murder. The decision was largely based upon the prevailing opinion
that the Chinese were

The ruling effectively made white violence against Chinese
Americans unprosecutable, arguably leading to more intense
white-on-Chinese race riots, such as the 1877 San Francisco Riot. The Chinese
living in California were with this decision left practically in a
legal vacuum, because they had now no possibility to assert their
rightful legal entitlements or claims – possibly in cases of theft
or breaches of agreement – in court. The ruling remained in force
until 1873.

Since there was a lack of white European construction workers, in
1865 a large number of Chinese workers were recruited from the
silver mines, as well as later contract workers from China. The
idea for the use of Chinese labor came from the manager of the
Central Pacific Railroad, Charles
Crocker who at first had trouble persuading his business
partners of the fact that the mostly weedy, slender looking Chinese
workers, some contemptuously called "Crocker's pets", were suitable
for the heavy physical work. For the Central Pacific Railroad, hiring
Chinese as opposed to whites kept labor costs down by a third,
since the company would not pay their board or lodging. This type
of steep wage inequality was commonplace at the time. Eventually
Crocker overcame shortages of manpower and money by hiring Chinese
immigrants to do much of the back-breaking and dangerous labor. He
drove the workers to the point of exhaustion, in the process
setting records for laying track and finishing the project seven
years ahead of the government's deadline.

The Central Pacific track was constructed primarily by Chinese
immigrants. Even though at first they were thought to be too weak
or fragile to do this type of work, after the first day in which
Chinese were on the line, the decision was made to hire as many as
could be found in California (where most were gold miners or in
service industries such as laundries and kitchens). Many more were
imported from China. Most of the men received between one and three
dollars per day, but the workers from China received much less.
Eventually, they went on strike and gained small increases in
salary.

The route laid not only had to go across rivers and canyons, which had to be bridged, but also through
two mountain ranges - the Sierra
Nevada and the Rocky Mountains -
where tunnels had to be created. The explosions had caused many of
the Chinese laborers to lose their lives. Due to the wide expanse
of the work, the construction had to be carried out at times in the
extreme heat and also in other times in the bitter winter cold. So
harsh were the conditions that sometimes even entire camps were
buried under avalanches.

The Central Pacific made great progress along the Sacramento Valley. However construction
was slowed, first by the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, then by
the mountains themselves and most importantly by winter snowstorms.
Consequently, the Central Pacific expanded its efforts to hire
immigrant laborers (many of whom were Chinese). The immigrants
seemed to be more willing to tolerate the horrible conditions, and
progress continued. The increasing necessity for tunnelling then
began to slow progress of the line yet again. To combat this,
Central Pacific began to use the newly invented and very unstable
nitro-glycerine explosives—which
accelerated both the rate of construction and the mortality of the
Chinese laborers. Appalled by the losses, the Central Pacific began
to use less volatile explosives and developed a method of placing
the explosives in which the Chinese blasters worked from large
suspended baskets which were then rapidly pulled to safety after
the fuses were lit.

The well organized Chinese teams still turned out to be highly
industrious and exceedingly efficient; at the peak of the
construction work, shortly before completion of the railroad, more
than 11,000 Chinese were involved with the project. Although the
white European workers had higher wages and better working
conditions, their share of the workforce was never more than 10
percent. As the Chinese railroad workers lived and worked
tirelessly, they also managed the finances associated with their
employment, and Central Pacific officials responsible for employing
the Chinese, even those at first opposed to the hiring policy, came
to appreciate the cleanliness and reliability of this group of
laborers.

After 1869, the Southern
Pacific Railroad and Northwestern Pacific Railroad
led the expansion of the railway network further into the American
West, and many of the Chinese who had built the transcontinental
railroad remained active in building the railways. After several
projects were completed, many of the Chinese workers relocated and
looked for employment elsewhere, such as in farming, manufacturing
firms, garment industries, and paper
mills. However, widespread anti-Chinese discrimination and violence from
whites, including riots and murders, drove many
into self-employment.

Agriculture

Up until the middle of the 19th century, wheat
was primarily grown in California. The favorable climate allowed
the beginning of the intensive cultivation of certain fruit,
vegetables and flowers. In the East Coast of the United
States a strong demand for these products existed. However, the
supply of these markets became possible only with the completion of
the transcontinental
railroad. Just as with the railway construction, there was a
dire manpower shortage in the expanding Californian agriculture
sector, so the white landowners began in the 1860s to put thousands
of Chinese migrants to work in their large-scale farms and other
agricultural enterprises. Many of these Chinese laborers were not
unskilled seasonal workers, but were in fact experienced farmers,
whose vital expertise the Californian fruit, vegetables and wine
industries owe much to this very day. Despite this, the Chinese
immigrants could not own any land on account of the laws in
California at the time. Nevertheless they frequently pursued
agricultural work under leases or profit-sharing contracts which
they signed with their employers.

Many of
these Chinese men came from the Pearl River Delta Region in southern China, where they had learned
how to develop fertile farmland in inaccessible river
valleys. This know-how was used for the reclamation of the
extensive valleys of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
During
the 1870s, thousands of Chinese laborers played an indispensable
role in the construction of a vast network of earthen levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Delta in California. These levees opened up
thousands of acres of highly fertile marshlands for agricultural production. Chinese
workers were used to construct hundreds of miles of levees
throughout the delta's waterways in an effort to reclaim and
preserve farmland and control flooding. These levees therefore
confined waterflow to the riverbeds. Many of the workers stayed in
the area and made a living as farm workers or sharecroppers, until they were driven out
during an outbreak of anti-Chinese violence in the mid-1890s.

Anti-Chinese movement

In the 1870s several economic crisises came about in parts of the
United States, and many Americans lost their jobs, from which arose
throughout the American West an anti-Chinese movement and its main mouthpiece,
the Workingman's Party labor
organization, which was led by the Californian Dennis Kearney. The party took particular aim
against Chinese immigrant labor and the Central Pacific Railroad
which employed them. Its famous slogan was "The Chinese must
go!". Kearney's attacks against the Chinese were particularly
virulent and openly racist, and found
considerable support among white people in the American West. This
sentiment led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Their
propaganda branded the Chinese migrants as "perpetual foreigners"
whose work caused wage dumping and thereby prevented American men
from "gaining work". After the 1893 economic downturn, measures
adopted in the severe depression included anti-Chinese riots that
eventually spread throughout the West from which came racist
violence and massacres. Most of the Chinese farm workers, which in
1890 made up a 75 percent share of all Californian agricultural
workers, were expelled. The Chinese found refuge and shelter in the
Chinatowns of large cities. The vacant
agricultural jobs subsequently proved to be so unattractive to the
unemployed white Europeans that they avoided to sign up; most of
the vacancies were then filled by Japanese workers, after whom in
the decades later came the Filippinos, and finally the Mexicans.
The term "Chinaman", originally coined as a
self-referential term by the Chinese, came to be used as a term
against the Chinese in America as the new term "Chinaman's chance" came to symbolize the
unfairness Chinese experienced in the American justice system as
some were murded largely on account of hatred of their race and
culture.

Again this initial success was met with a hostile reaction.
Since the
late 1850s, European migrants – above all Greeks, Italians and Dalmatians – moved into
fishing off the American west coast too, and they exerted pressure
on the California
legislature, which, finally, expelled the Chinese fishermen
with a whole array of taxes, laws and regulations. They had
to pay special taxes (Chinese Fisherman's Tax), and they were not
allowed to fish with traditional Chinese nets nor with junks. The
most disastrous effect occurred when the Scott Act, a federal US law
adopted in 1888, established that the Chinese migrants, even when
they had entered and were living the US legally, could not re-enter
after having temporarily left US territory. The Chinese fishermen,
in effect, could therefore not leave with their boats the zone of
the west coast. Their work became unprofitable, and gradually they
gave up fishing. The only area where the Chinese fishermen remained
unchallenged was shark fishing, where they stood in no competition
to the European-Americans. Many former fishermen found work in the
salmon canneries which until the 1930s were
major employers of Chinese migrants, because white workers were
barely interested in engaging in such hard, seasonal and relatively
unrewarding activities.

Other occupations

A Chinese cigar factory in San
Francisco.

Since the California gold rush,
many Chinese migrants made their living as domestic servants,
housekeepers, running restaurants, laundries (leading to the 1886
Supreme Court decision Yick Wo v.Hopkins and then to the 1933
creation of the Chinese
Hand Laundry Alliance) and a wide spectrum of shops, such as
food stores, antique shops, jewelers, and imported goods stores. In
addition, the Chinese often worked in borax
and mercury mines, as seamen on
board the ships of American shipping companies or in the consumer
goods industry, especially in the cigar, boots, footwear and
textile manufacturing. During the economic crises of the 1870s,
factory owners were often glad that the migrants were content with
the low wages given. The Chinese took the bad wages, because their
wives and children lived in China where the cost of living was low.
As they were classified as foreigners they were excluded from
joining American trade unions, and so
they formed their own Chinese organizations (called "guilds") which
represented their interests with the employers. The American trade
unionists were nevertheless still wary as the Chinese workers were
willing to work for their employers for relatively low wages and
incidentally acted as strikebreakers
thereby running counter to the interests of the trade unions. In
fact, many employers used the threat of importing Chinese
strikebreakers as a means to prevent or break up strikes which
caused further resentment against the Chinese. A notable incident
occurred in 1870, when 75 young men from China were hired to
replace striking shoe workers in North Adams,
Massachusetts. Nevertheless, these young men had no idea
that they had been brought from San Francisco by the superintendent
of the shoe factory to act as strikebreakers at their destination.
This incident provided the trade unions with their propaganda which
was later repeatedly cited calling for the immediate and total
exclusion of the Chinese. This particular controversy slackened
somewhat as attention focused on the economic crises in 1875 when
the majority of cigar and boots manufacturing companies went under.
Mainly it was the textile industry that survived which still
employed Chinese workers in large numbers. In 1876, in response to
the rising anti-Chinese hysteria, both major political parties
included Chinese exclusion in their campaign platforms as a way to
win votes taking advantage of the nation's industrial crisis.
Rather than directly confronting the divisive problems such as
class conflict, economic depression, and rising unemployment, this
helped put the question of Chinese immigration and contracted
Chinese workers on the national agenda and eventually paved way for
the era's most racist legislation, the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

Exclusion era

Settlement

1892 certificate of residence for Hang
Jung: From Papers relating to Chinese in California

the country, Chinese immigrants clustered in Chinatowns. The largest population was in San Francisco.Some estimated over half of these early
immigrants were from Taishan. At first, when surface gold was plentiful,
the Chinese were well tolerated and well-received. As the easy gold
dwindled and competition for it intensified, animosity to the
Chinese and other foreigners increased. Organized labor groups
demanded that California's gold was only for Americans, and began
to physically threaten foreigners' mines or gold diggings. Most,
after being forcibly driven from the mines, settled in Chinese
enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low end wage
labor such as restaurant work and laundry. A few settled in towns
throughout the west. With the post Civil War economy in decline by
the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor
leader Dennis Kearney and his
Workingman's Party as well as by
Governor John Bigler, both of whom
blamed Chinese "coolies" for depressed wage
levels.

Discrimination

The flow of immigration (encouraged by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868) was stopped by
the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882. This act outlawed all Chinese
immigration to the United States and denied citizenship to those already settled in the
country. Renewed in 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902, the
Chinese population declined until the act was repealed in 1943 by
the Magnuson Act. Official discrimination extended to the highest levels
of the U.S. government: in 1888, U.S.PresidentGrover Cleveland, who supported the
Chinese Exclusion Act,
proclaimed the Chinese "an element ignorant of our constitution and
laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to
our peace and welfare."

Many Western states also enacted discriminatory laws which made it
difficult for Chinese and Japanese
immigrants to own land and find work. Some of these Anti-Chinese laws were the Foreign Miners'
License tax, which required a monthly payment of three dollars from
every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen.
Foreign-born Chinese could not become citizens because they had
been rendered ineligible to citizenship by the Naturalization Act of 1790 that
reserved naturalized citizenship to
""free white persons". This remained in place until voided by the
Civil Rights Act of 1870.

By then,
California had collected five million dollars from the
Chinese. Another was "An Act to Discourage Immigration to
this State of Persons Who Cannot Become Citizens Thereof", which
imposed on the master or owner of a ship a landing tax of fifty
dollars for each passenger ineligible to naturalized citizenship.
"To Protect Free White Labor against competition with Chinese
Coolie Labor and to Discourage the
Immigration of Chinese into the State of California" was another
law (aka Anti-Coolie Act, 1862) that
imposed a $2.50 tax per month on all Chinese residing in the state,
except Chinese operating businesses, licensed to work in mines, or
engaged in the production of sugar, rice, coffee or tea. In 1886,
the Supreme Court struck down a Californian law, in Yick Wo v.Hopkins, judging that although it was
race-neutral on its face, it was
administered in a prejudicial manner was an infringement of the
Equal Protection Clause in
the Fourteenth
Amendment to the U.S.Constitution. The law aimed in particular
against Chinese laundry businesses.

However, this decision was only a temporary setback for the
Nativist movement. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act made it unlawful
for Chinese laborers to enter the United States for the next 10
years and denied naturalized citizenship to Chinese already here.
Initially intended for Chinese laborers, it was broadened in 1888
to include all persons of the "Chinese
race". And in 1896, Plessy v.Ferguson effectively canceled
Yick Wo. v. Hopkins, by supporting the "separate but equal" doctrine.

The 1906 San Francisco
earthquake allowed a critical change to Chinese immigration
patterns. The practice known as "Paper
Sons" and "Paper Daughters" was
allegedly introduced . Chinese would declare themselves to be
United States citizens whose records were lost in the
earthquake.

It was passed during World War II, when
China was a welcome ally to the United States. It limited Chinese
immigrants to 105 visas per year selected by the government. That
quota was determined by the Immigration Act of 1924, which set
immigration from an allowed country at 2% of the number of people
who were already living in the United States in 1890 of that
nationality. Chinese immigration later increased with the passage
of the Immigration and
Nationality Services Act of 1965.

Immigration and Nationality Act

With the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952,
and later the Immigration and
Nationality Services Act of 1965. Until 1979, the
United States recognized the Republic of China on Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of all
of China, and the immigration from Taiwan was counted under the
same quota as that for mainland China, which had no immigration to
the United States from 1949 to 1977. During the late 1970s,
the opening up of the People's Republic of China and the breaking
of diplomatic relations with the Republic of China led to the
passage, in 1979, of the Taiwan
Relations Act placed Taiwan as an area with a separate
immigration quota than the People's Republic of China. Under
British rule, Hong Kong was considered a separate jurisidiction for
the purpose of immigration, and this status continued after the
handover in 1997 as a result of the Immigration Act of 1990.

During the late 1960s and early and mid-1970, Chinese immigration
into the United States came almost exclusively from Taiwan creating
the Taiwanese American subgroup.
Immigration from Mainland China was almost non-existent until 1977,
when the PRC removed restrictions on emigration leading to
immigration of college students and professionals. These two groups
of Chinese tended to cluster in suburban areas and to avoid urban
Chinatowns and speak fluent Mandarin in addition to their native
dialects.

Ethnic
Chinese immigration to the United States since 1965 has been aided
by the fact that the United States maintains separate quotas for
Mainland China, Taiwan, and
Hong
Kong.Absent from the list of Chinese Americans
are immigrants from Hong
Kong, who because of immigration law, tended to
immigrate to Canada.

Third wave (1980s to today)

In
addition to students and professionals, a third wave of recent
immigrants consisted of undocumented aliens, chiefly from Fujian
province–particularly the counties around Fuzhou–who went to
the United States in search of lower-status manual jobs.These
aliens tend to concentrate in urban areas such as New York City,Philadelphia and there is often very little contact between
these Chinese and those higher-educated Chinese
professionals.

The
amount of immigration from this group has begun to decrease as the
economic situation in Fujian
improves. Typically, an immigrant from Fujian will pay a
snakehead several tens of thousands
of dollars to be transported to the United States, as well as room
and board. The funds for the trip are provided by the immigrant's
family and village. The immigrant will usually work for three
years, the first two to pay off the debt and the third as
profit.

In the
1980s, there was widespread concern by the PRC over a brain drain as
graduate students were not returning to the PRC.This
exodus worsened after the Tiananmen protests of 1989. However since the start of the 21st
century, there have been an increasing number of returnees
producing a brain gain for the PRC.

Many immigrants from the PRC benefited from the Chinese Student
Protection Act of 1992 which granted permanent residency status
to immigrants from the PRC. One unintended side effect of the law
was that the primary beneficiaries of the law were undocumented
Fujianese immigrants, who unlike the Chinese graduate students
would have had no chance to gain permanent residency through normal
means.Besides that,many Fujianese also have gained legal residency
by filing political asylum,such as refugees of China's one child policy,Falun Gong.

Statistics of the Chinese population in the United States
(1840-2004)

The table shows the ethnic Chinese population of the USA (including
persons with mixed-ethnic origin).

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore. A History of
Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989.

Brownstone, p. 59–64; McCunn, p.27

Ong, Paul M. "The Central Pacific Railroad and Exploitation of
Chinese Labor." Journal of Ethnic Studies 1985 13(2): 119-124. ISSN
0091-3219. -- Ong tries to resolve the apparent inconsistency in
the literature on Asians in early California, with contradictory
studies showing evidence both for and against the exploitation of
Chinese labor by the Central Pacific Railroad, using monopsony
theory as developed by Joan Robinson. Monopsonists are buyers whose
share of the market is large enough to affect prices, or whose
supply curves are not completely elastic. By setting different
wages for whites and Chinese - each having different elasticities
of supply - and using Chinese in the menial and dangerous jobs,
with whites in the better positions, the two groups were
complementary rather than interchangeable. Calculations thus prove
higher levels of exploitation of the Chinese than in previous
studies.

Saxton, Alexander. "The Army of Canton in the High Sierra"
Pacific Historical Review 1966 35(2): 141-151. ISSN 0030-8684

China's Great Migration, by Patrick Radden
Keefe: "The overwhelming majority of Chinese who have emigrated to
the United States over the past 20 years come from a handful of
counties around Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province."

US Census: Race and Hispanic or Latino: 2000[2]; US Census: 1990[3]; US Census: Population 1790-1990[4]; Comparison of Asian Populations during the
Exclusion Years[5]; Estimation of the US-Census for the year
2004 [6]

John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden (1952) set chiefly
in late 19th Century California, has a sympathetic portrayal of a
Chinese American, Lee, who is the servant of a local landowner. Lee
tells some of the story of the immigrant Chinese, at several places
in the text.